Day 16.5 — Engine issues keep Sharks grounded in St. Paul, no new info on Couture, those darn deflections

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Maybe it’s because I’ve had my share of travel, um, inconveniences this season. But for whatever reason, I’m feeling the Sharks pain right now.

No, not the angst that comes with a 2-6-1 roadie. And not even the literal pain that Todd McLellan is dealing with after getting smacked with a stick early in the second period.

Because of on top of all that, on top of the fact they’ve been on the road since before Valentine’s Day, the Sharks are not flying home as planned tonight.

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Mechanical trouble grounded their charter plane and they’ve all been brought back to their usual hotel in St. Paul, which luckily had not filled the necessary 40 or 50 rooms.

Yeah, I hear some of you taking delight in that. But realize this means they’ll be playing Philadephia at home on Tuesday night without the benefit of a true day off. Travel days, trust me, are not true days off.

Meanwhile, the Flyers area already in the Bay Area, enjoying the sunshine and basically chillin’.

Yeah, I know the coaches and players will say “no excuses.” But the unfriendly skies have just made the challenge of putting this miserable 2-6-1 trip behind them even greater.

*****No update on Logan Couture’s injury. He was on the receiving end of three hard hits Sunday night, the last coming at 2:24 of the third period and delivered by Greg Zanon. Couture didn’t skate a shift after that because of a lower body injury, but I’ve got nothing more specific.

Assistant coach Matt Shaw, filling in after the game for McLellan, said there would be “further evaluation tomorrow. It might have been cumulative. I know he had a couple good, clean, hard hockey hits and we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.”

*****Some of this shows up in the print edition story linked in the right-hand column, but here’s more of what Jamie McGinn had to say about setting in motion the sequence of events that ended up with Todd McLellan taking a serious hit to head from Marco Scandella’s stick.

“I hit the guy and I skated away. I didn’t even know what happened,” McGinn said.

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Did you sense it was tough on the team to see their coach hit like that?

“It’s tough. It’s such a freak accident,” McGinn said. “You don’t want anything like that to happen and then to have it happen to a head coach, it’s definitely a curve ball thrown at us during the game. But things like that happen in hockey and we have to respond well.”

*****Thomas Greiss gave up three goals on deflections, one of them off Patrick Marleau’s skate. But it was the shot by Cal Clutterbuck that was the first to elude Greiss and here’s his description of how things went wrong:

“It was on the ice and I’m looking for it to chip it in the corner,” Greiss said, “and all of a sudden it jumped up on me, hit my blocker and jumped in.”

*****By the way, nobody was getting a pass on those last two Minnesota goals even if they did come off serious deflections.

“Things that you do to score goals in the league these days is you put pucks to the net,” Shaw said. “People in and around the net, if you can’t control the body, you want to control the stick as best you can and we weren’t able to do that.”

From Greiss: “Those two shots got away from us. It’s tough to defend, but we’ve got to think about what we’re going to do about that.”

*****Just checked and the Sharks were unsure as to when they’d actually get out of MSP on Monday. Or even what plane they would be taking.

If they could repair the mechanical problem that kept them on the ground, an early was start likely. If they couldn’t, another plane would have to be brought into play. And that could take more time.

*****Me, I’ve got a 7:40 a.m. flight booked with a change of planes along the way. After today (and, true confession time, I missed the opening faceoff because of a variety of problems), it’ll be interesting to see who gets home first — me or the team I cover.

Let the race begin.

David Pollak

David Pollak has been following the NHL forever and at the Mercury News as an editor or reporter since 1987. For almost a decade he wrote about the Sharks as the paper's Fan in the Stands before joining the sports department in 2001. He became the Sharks beat writer before the 2007-08 season and began this blog at that time. You can also follow him on Twitter at @PollakOnSharks.

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To build on what PNEIba said, or why US Refiners don’t build a refinery in Canada close to the source. Piping the oil all the way to the Southern US only to truck the fuel oil and gas back North (where most is used) seems terribly inefficient.